... ignored for years), CIA Director Tenet who eventually tried to get Washington to take bin Laden seriously and Richard Clarke, who did the same, get what little professional credit there is to be had from the killing of more than a million Afghanis. (3) Bamford spends much less time on the run-up to 9-11. With his NSA sources (he wrote The Puzzle Palace about the NSA), he emphasises the technical difficulties involved in tracking and intercepting people who are using digital communications, and criticises the CIA clandestine services as risk-averse and incompetent. Where Coll is ultimately putting the case for the CIA in the post 9-11 blame game, Bamford's much less detailed account has ...

... ensure new digital telecommunication systems do not hinder surveillance capabilities, and requiring the installation of monitoring capacity in these systems for national security/law enforcement purposes: 'Acting in secret and without parliamentary knowledge or government supervision, the FBI through ILETS has since 1993 steered government and communications policy across the world. In the shadows behind the FBI stood the NSA whose global security operations could only benefit if, around the world, users were systematically to be denied telecommunications privacy in the information age.'(8) UK policy on crypto This government and the previous government have published a number of consultation papers and statements covering encryption and electronic commerce in recent years, the Department of Trade and ...

... whistle. National Security Archive http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive An independent research institute and library in Washington DC, the archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act. First menu includes:The Archive. An overview of the archive (over 90,000 records of released documents). Archive publications. Includes NSA index on CD Rom, Nicaragua 1978-90, South Africa 1962-89, US Intelligence Community 1947-89, Military Uses of Space 1945-91, Nuclear non-proliferation 1945-90, Iran-contra, Presidential directives on national security. Collections Database. Searchable database. Freedom of Information Archive. Full text and how to use FOIA. Nuclear History: includes the Cuban Missile Crisis, ...

... to consult with civil servants there about introducing the polygraph." (Guardian 7th December) Worth quoting from James Bamford's The Puzzle Palace (London 1982) on all this. He said, p xxxiii of all these moves: "It was all nonsense. As weak as security was at GCHQ, it was a fortress compared to the NSA. The NSA was simply better at hiding how much and how badly it had been penetrated." Secrecy Evidence on public records policy taken by House of Commons Select C'ttee on Education, Science and the Arts published in July (1983). Christopher Price MP, one of the committee's members, on how the system works and its ...

... individuals. In chapter 10 that is provided essentially by a Mr Bob Oeschler, who claims to have worked on a U.S. government-funded program working with crashed alien craft; retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former Director of the National Security Agency; and retired Rear Admiral Shapiro, former head of the Office of Naval Intelligence. As a former NSA head, Inman's evidence in particular is quite a coup. For if any state agency in the U.S. could be presumed to know about alien landings etc., it would be the NSA with its global surveillance cover. What Bobby Ray Inman said Mr Good begins chapter 10 with an alleged encounter between Admiral Inman and Bob Oeschler in ...

... http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/sp/ This was mentioned briefly in the Guardian some months ago. Hager has done a Duncan Campbell and stitched together, in incredible detail, New Zealand's contribution to the NSA-run global network of communications interception. But his work goes much further than that and anyone interested in GCHQ or the NSA, the history of signals intelligence since WW2, the relationship between politicians and spooks, the anti-nuclear campaign in New Zealand, or, indeed, the geo-politics of that part of the Pacific, will find something of value here. His central discovery is a system known as Echelon, a bunch of super computers which scan the world's communications ...

... Lange papers, was the 1985/6 annual report of Government Communications Secur-ity Bureau's – the New Zealand outpost of the NSA's net-work of listening/interception stations. (We have GCHQ at Cheltenham and Menwith Hill.) The report shows that GCSB was intercepting, tasked mostly by the US, and doing trans-lation/decoding work for GCHQ and NSA – intercept outsourcing, as it were.2 Murray Horton, of the New Zealand Anti-Bases Campaign, commented that the report'....listed just who it was that the Bureau was spying on 20 years ago – the list included any number of friendly countries, including Pacific neighbours. Most damningly, it also included the United Nations. Why ...

... of the Black Panthers. The basis of this collection was a conference on counterinsurgency and policing: to the proceedings of which have been added activists' accounts of facing this repressive mechanism. (There is also a paper on US military translators which seems to have wandered into the wrong conference.) Unfortunately the book was put together before the NSA- Snowden events and doesn't directly address the largely unspoken subtext of the NSA story: how do you organise for change when the state can intercept all electronic and paper communications? Send hand-carried messages? Use pigeons? Because counterinsurgency (CI) theory starts by telling the state to address the causes of discontent, the growing adoption of CI ...

... group of MPs from across Europe called for 'the depoliticization of intelligence in EU member states, and for a European code of intelligence ethics.’ 'Intelligence ethics': the phrase has a ring about it. It could refer to the indiscriminate trawling of private communications which is at the root of the current controversy over Edward Snowden's revelations, with the American NSA and Britain's GCHQ now notoriously in cahoots. It could also cover the question of accountability, and the fact that none of us was told – and few imagined – that this extent of surveillance was going on. 'In a democracy,' Jeffreys-Jones writes, only 'intelligence activities that are properly overseen command the confidence of the people.’ It's also ...